A Man Called Ove

Several years ago there was a book by a Swedish author translated into English. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for forty-two straight weeks. It was made into a movie in Sweden and is now being made in the U.S. Tom Hanks will play the man called Ove. Of course I am just finding out about this now. My daughter told me about it when I was complaining one time about Nicholas Nickleby. She said her mother (the Second Unfortunate Ex-Mrs. Harris) and her mother's sig-oth both had read it and loved it. I immediately ordered it from bn.com. I am now within fifty pages of completing it.

The book is darling, utterly charming. If we're honest with ourselves we Boomers are a little defensive with the beginning as Fredrik Backman, the author, applies the first brush strokes to his portrait of Ove (Ove can't order a computer.). A little defensive I looked up Backman to see what kind of man he was. He had read an account in a Swedish newspaper of a Boomer who couldn't order theater tickets and publicly lost it in his frustration. Backman, when he read the newspaper account, immediately identified with the Boomer. Backman was only thirty-one when Ove was published in Sweden. 

Apparently there is this newfangled novelistic style where the author is permitted to jump back and forth among ages and eras of his characters' lives. I found the style exceedingly annoying and confusing when I first encountered it in All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. There is some of that in Ove as well. I don't know, maybe the authors are channeling the uncertainty of space-time. Or are muddying the waters to make them look deep.

As I got further into the book I was struck by the similarities to the American film As Good as It Gets (1997). Now near the end the parallels are solidified. It is uncanny. There's the psychologically tortured Boomer; there's the softening influence on him of a loved woman; there's the softening influence of an animal taken in, initially in both cases over vehement protest; the softening influence of children. In both there is the Boomer's empathy molded by the different, in the book, initially by a Persian woman, uncannily in both book and film by gay men, done in both with the knowledge that the woman loved would approve. In both the Boomer ends up taking in the "fudgepacker" in the film, the "bender" in the book, when their fathers forsake them. In both there is life resurrected, snatched from oblivion. We never find out whether Melvin's new life with the dog and Carol and her son Spencer and Simon-the-fag works out. The film's ending leaves that happily vague. And I don't know yet how Ove lives his new life with the cat and Misrad-the-bent and Parveneh and her kids but a new life Ove has. He has failed four times so far in ending his old life violently so that he can be with his beloved Sonja in the afterlife. Maybe heaven is a place on earth.